Design Challenge, Product Design

Designing a better pet adoption experience

Overview

The focus to design an onboarding experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion.

Details

I had one week to work on this challenge as part of the interview process for a client. The task was to showcase my design process and provide 1-2 final UI screens.

Problem statement

Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. How can we create an onboarding experience to help connect people who are looking for a new pet with the right companion?

My approach

1 User Discovery

  • Problem statement

  • User persona

  • User journey map

  • High-level user flow

2 Design Research

  • Competitive research

3 Design Concepts

  • Sketches

  • High-Fidelity Designs

  • Learnings

User Persona

I created a user persona based on the challenge’s prompt, and information I gathered independently. I consulted travel blogs and forums, reviews of other travel and cruise apps, and my own personal knowledge. To fill in any gaps, I asked AI to inform me of current consumer and traveler behavior trends as well. I used this persona to guide the rest of my design process.

User Journey

With my user persona in mind, I crafted a user journey. One of the unique things I wanted to focus on with this user journey was the idea of “Timing & Urgency.”
Aside from the common aspects of a user journey such as goals, feelings, pain points and opportunities, I wanted to highlight the importance of the speed and timeliness of a task.

For example, is the adventure the user is looking to book happening in a month, a day, or in the next few hours? How would the timing of the event affect the flow, the user’s behavior, and their feelings?

High-level user flow

Once I understood the user journey and the user’s behavior, I started thinking through a high-level user flow for booking adventures for a cruise that’s already been booked. I focused on the booking flow itself, with consideration for ancillary flows that informed booking such as reading reviews, viewing trending experiences or chatting with a rep.

Competitive Research

Direct competitors

I looked at direct competitors, including other cruise lines such as Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Carnival, and MSC. I noticed that their apps already had experiences similar to the one I was designing.

Indirect competitors

I looked at indirect competitors, including travels, lifelog and experience recommendation apps, and best-in-class examples such as Airbnb. I especially paid attention to the visual presentation of these apps. How did they present experiences? Why were some apps more successful than others? What were some trends prevalent throughout the apps?

Sketches

I started by drawing some quick sketches by hand. Taking inspiration from indirect competitors, I explored how strategic visual elements and iconography could create a more modern, fresh experience. My approach prioritized immersive imagery and video content for activity detail pages, recognizing how these elements enhance engagement and comprehension while differentiating from existing direct competitor apps.

High-fidelity designs

For my final designs, I focused on the My Plans landing page, activity detail page, and the explore category landing page

I annotated each of the high-fidelity designs to showcase some of the key features and components.

Learnings

This project brought me back to the basics of UX and product design. In a few hours, I was able to go through my typical creative process, and come up with an idea that excited me, and felt like the beginning of a functional app that solved the initial challenge.

It was cool to learn about and design for an industry, travel, I haven’t had much experience with, and learn the lay of the land. It was also a great exercise to apply my design skills to information rich detail pages, category pages, and explore functionality.